I woke up a couple of hours ago and have not been able to get back to sleep. Here’s a slightly edited version of something I wrote on a similar sleepless night three and a half years ago:

After tossing and turning and making an unsuccessful attempt to nuzzle up behind my sleeping wife, I roll out of bed and pace the living room. Silence except for the noise of cars cutting West through the darkness on the interstate and the electrical hum of modern life.

Light cuts across the floor; illumination from the sleeping shopping district. I shuffle back and forth across the room. Sit. Stand. Look outside, upward, wishing for a sky that isn’t murky gray-brown but a radiant blanket of stars. Disappointed again. Move from room to room listening for the drone of insects and wind in the trees. Instead, computer fans and spinning plates of metal on stepper motors chirping along.

In this moment I desire for comfort in bucolic tasks. Never more have I wanted to build a cabin on a slope of wild grasses, hedged in by the trees. Dig a pit for my excrement. Steal branches and hone with stone.

I am Man. A creature. Myself honed over the ages to a life of survival using the elements that surround me. Tonight I find myself caged in by walls of material I can’t identify as wood or rock or vegetation. I reach out and I touch them with trepidation. Unsure of what they are, how they arrived here, and for what purpose.

Where will the men of America head? We are young in History, but our trend is clear. Always away from home. Across the sea. Kissing goodbye. Heading away from these familiar constraints. Westward. Fleeing.

But now, looking around the room—out through the vertical bars of venetian blinds—I fear we can escape no longer.

The implications of this New York times article are boggling: Target figures out a girl is pregnant before her dad does.

About a year after Pole created his pregnancy-prediction model, a man walked into a Target outside Minneapolis and demanded to see the manager. He was clutching coupons that had been sent to his daughter, and he was angry, according to an employee who participated in the conversation.

“My daughter got this in the mail!” he said. “She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?”

The manager didn’t have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man’s daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of smiling infants. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again.

On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. “I had a talk with my daughter,” he said. “It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.”

It seems like, if anything, the apology should go the other direction. Via Slashdot.